I grew up not too far north of the poverty line. I never felt that we were "poor," but as I grew up, I was increasingly aware of what we didn't have, and that really hit home when I went to college. I joined a fraternity, and most of my fraternity brothers - and other friends - were from the well-to-do suburbs of Johnson County, Kansas, not the wrong side of the tracks in Newton, Kansas.
Once I got my act together, I busted my tail to make sure that my own family would never want for anything. Don't get me wrong; one thing that my family had when I was growing up was love, although we weren't without our flaws (sometimes it felt like we put the "fun" in "dysfunction"). And I always knew that love was the greatest gift I could give my family as an adult. But it was also important to me that we had an abundance of experiences, first and foremost. And yes, the creature comforts of life, and financial security - both present and future - were important to me.
Looking back on my youth, I'll never forget one Thanksgiving in particular. Now, my family always had the traditional dinner: turkey, stuffing, gravy, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie - the whole nine yards. We did not do without in that regard.
But I knew that some did. And one year that became poignantly clear to me.
It was my senior year in high school, and I was working at a local grocery store. I happened to be working on Thanksgiving Day, but my shift would end in time to be home for Thanksgiving dinner that evening. I was sacking groceries, when a man stepped up to the cash register and placed a few items on the belt:
A Swanson's TV dinner; roast turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, and some vegetable that I don't recall. A frozen pumpkin pie. Some store-brand whipped topping.
He was alone. That was his Thanksgiving dinner. If it had been up to me, I'd have invited him to our house for dinner, but it wasn't up to me, and I didn't. I probably should have anyway. I still think about him. The memory sticks with me, and I think about it every Thanksgiving, even 46 years later. There, but for the grace of God ...
***************
Fast forward to today. Like I said, I've worked hard to make sure that I'm not in that position, and never will be. Not everyone is so fortunate, and I'm thankful for how blessed I am every day. (Don't get me wrong; I'm not implying that that man didn't work hard - he may not have had the opportunities I've had. He may not have taken the risks I've taken. I don't know his circumstances.) But I worked plenty of factory jobs in my hometown, and even before I knew what I wanted to do with my life, I knew what I didn't want to do, and how I didn't want to live.
So as I entered that phase of my life in which I could be reasonably assured that, even should a calamity strike - the loss of a job, the stock market tanking, or some other unexpected risk - I wouldn't be living in a refrigerator box; that I would be comfortable no matter what, I suppose I developed a certain set of expectations. I guess I began to see a certain ordering of things in the world in which I lived.
Now, you may call that arrogant. You could certainly call it privileged; it is. It's also earned. I worked those factory jobs. Then, I went to college, worked hard to get a degree, paid back my student loans without complaining about them, worked even harder to get promoted, became a CEO, became successful, and wound up a far cry from the factory floor. Not by luck, and certainly not by family connections. By hard work.
Listen, I've visited Africa, on several occasions. I know I'm privileged. I know what extreme poverty looks like. I know how fortunate I am.
If you're reading this from the United States of America, I also know how fortunate you are. Do you?
I take for granted certain things. Like when I go to the grocery store, it's going to take me a few minutes to find my favorite cereal, because there are so many different kinds of cereal I can't find the box right away. That I'm going to have to take a picture of my toothpaste tube before I go to the store because there are so many different varieties, I forget which kind I always use (and I'm a creature of habit - just ask my wife, when she thinks I might like to try something new). That if I decide to start cycling again and want to buy a bike, I'll be able to find one, configured the way I want, in my size, without waiting for it.
In other words, as our friends across the pond would say, we're spoilt for choice. That fact was driven home when I brought a young man from Malawi to the U.S. for an internship eight years ago. The first time I took him to Target, he was overwhelmed by the choices he faced in selecting everything from toothpaste to deodorant to breakfast cereal to soda. Conversely, when I've visited Malawi, I've discovered the opposite. There, they refer to bath soap generically as "Lifebuoy," the way we refer to facial tissue generically as "Kleenex." Except while we do it due to the ubiquity of the brand, they do it because, when you go to a grocery store in Malawi, the only brand of bath soap you'll find is Lifebuoy. And not five different scents of Lifebuoy - just Lifebuoy. Likewise, they refer to toothpaste as Colgate, because if you want to buy toothpaste, Colgate is your only option.
However, when I've gone to a grocery store in Malawi - a third-world country, one of the poorest on the planet - I've always been able to buy Lifebuoy and Colgate. That's an important point in the context of today's post.
***************
I read a lot. Much of what I read is fiction, but it's fiction that makes me think, and I almost always learn something from it, especially about other places in the world. Early on in my reading, fiction and non-fiction alike, I learned about the Soviet Union - the gulags, the bread lines, neighbor spying on neighbor. It made me thankful not to live under a system like that.
In March 2020, my wife and I traveled to Hawaii over our anniversary. I had recently completed a round of work travel, and there was talk about some virus from China that was going around, but I didn't pay it too much attention. I did avoid Chinatown when I went to San Francisco, but that was about it.
Hawaii was crowded with tourists, as usual. Nothing different there. Many of the tourists were from Asia, which also isn't unusual. So this virus thing seemed like just another story for the 24/7 news media to latch onto for a few weeks until something else came along. Ha.
On our way back home, we connected through the San Jose airport. It was nearly deserted. We spent the night in San Jose to break up our trip, and we were practically the only ones staying in our hotel. Our shuttle driver told us that all of their conference business had dried up, and the hotel had laid off most non-tenured staff (note that San Jose is smack in the middle of Silicon Valley, and conferences are constant). When we got to the hotel, the restaurant was closed - not for the evening, but indefinitely - but we were able to eat in the bar.
That was our first indication that things weren't normal.
A couple of days after I got home, I went to the Target near our house, where I normally did our grocery shopping. As I pushed the cart through the aisles, I was literally laughing out loud. I know the word "literally" gets overused these days, so let me be clear: people probably thought I was crazy, because I was quite literally laughing out loud. The soup shelves were empty. Canned veggies and beans, empty. Tuna, empty. No flour. And paper goods? Forget it. No TP, facial tissue, or paper towels. Of course, no hand sanitizer or wipes, either.
Things remained that way for weeks, and I stopped laughing. At one point, I woke up at 5:00 am and went on a pre-dawn commando raid to find TP. My grocery shopping trips typically involved three stops to find everything on my list: Target, Wal-Mart, and the Price Chopper grocery store nearby. And even then, some items wound up not being found, like cream of mushroom soup or flour. I started buying things we didn't need when they were in stock and keeping them on hand in the basement, just in case. Not hoarding, just one package of that particular item.
I don't drink a lot of soda, but my soda of choice is Fresca. It's usually easy to find, as there aren't a lot of us Fresca-drinkers. But for a long period of time last year, there was a widespread Fresca shortage. It had to do with a combination of a shortage of aluminum and artificial sweetener, and the fact that Fresca isn't as big a seller for Coca Cola as its other diet sodas. Go figure.
I came to expect these things during that time. After all, the world's economy had been shut down in response to a virus that we've since learned is about as deadly as the 1958 or 1967 influenza outbreaks, neither of which led to shutdowns, mask mandates, or mass vaccination efforts. That led to near-term supply chain disruptions, which were to be expected. This was exacerbated by idiots who seemed to think that a respiratory virus would lead to an unabated frenzy of arse-wiping, inciting a need to hoard toilet paper.
Now, it's November 2021. It's been 18 months since the U.S. economy re-opened. And there is no longer any rational excuse, other than policy blunders, for the widespread supply chain disruptions that we continue to see. The chip shortages that result in delays of production of everything from new cars to refrigerators to toasters (yes, toasters) to plastic blanks for debit and credit cards, which have EMV chips embedded in them to help cut down on fraud.
Used car values have gone through the roof. You've been hearing about this, but below is some visual evidence to see just how acute it is:
This is data that I follow all the time, and I've never seen anything like it. It's quite extraordinary, and it's going to wreak havoc on used car lenders in a few years' time, because the cars they're going to be repossessing when loans go bad are going to be worth far, far less than the values they loaned on at purchase once things revert to the mean, as they always do.
We've all seen the images of the container ships stuck in the harbors off the West coast. We've been warned by our Vice President that it will take longer for our Christmas gifts to arrive this year. (Hey, she's gotta be good for something, it might as well be dispensing shopping advice. The VP on QVC.)
All of this is the result of bad policy decisions. I refer to it as "the unintended consequences of decisions made in the absence of forethought." Here's the scenario: there's a virus, and nobody pauses to think that it's really no worse, in the grand scheme of things, than the flu outbreaks of a few generations ago. (Tony Fauci thinks it is, because his research generated it, and he thinks his team created the mother of all viruses.)
So Fauci and a bunch of other government lackeys say, "Hey, let's just shut down the whole economy." No skin off their arses; they're the privileged class - and I mean truly privileged, in that they have access that the rest of us don't. So they don't think about the knock-on effects of that - the second- and third-order effects down the line of such a decision. That's why they call it a supply chain.
As a result, we once again see some stores having to limit purchases of toilet paper. That's okay, I guess, if it's what's needed to save us from the hoarders who associate respiratory viruses with pooping frequency and volume. But there are still the issues with cars, appliances, etc. I bought new garage doors this year, and it took five months for them to get in, when it would usually take a couple of weeks, according to my installer. I recently bought a bicycle, and while I was able to find what I wanted, I understand that a lot of people are struggling mightily to find bikes and other exercise equipment - especially indoor equipment, with all the people now working from home and not wanting to pay for gym memberships.
And I have a big problem with that. This isn't Malawi. And it isn't the Soviet Union. I didn't sign on for this.
Yeah, I sound privileged. So what? This is what I worked my tail off all my life for. So I don't need some overgrown kid living in his parents' basement playing on the Xbox they paid for, judging me for my "white (as if the color of my skin had screw-all to do with it) privilege" because I've worked all my life to earn the right to have a certain set of expectations about the order of the world in the country I live in - a concept that is foreign to him, because he hasn't worked hard enough to earn that right, and never paid attention in school, so doesn't understand the benefit of living in the country he lives in, nor the disadvantages of living under the Socialist regimes he regards as utopian.
And, I've voted to maintain this order. I'll have a post coming up on what we actually vote for when we throw that lever (okay, so nobody throws levers in the voting booth anymore). But I certainly didn't sign up for a regime of bread lines. And if we're headed that direction - in the immortal words of the Beatles, "don't you know that you can count me out."But what's even worse than these supply chain issues is the Left's casual attitude toward them. We should be paying close attention to that, because it's the most insidious part of all this, because it's the part that most closely mirrors the regimes of the bread lines.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who would win the award for smugness if that trait were considered enough of a virtue to warrant an award, ridiculed the notion of a delay in the delivery of a treadmill, as an example of supply chain disruptions. I guess the Mom who's stuck at home because she's home-schooling her kids because she doesn't want their faces diapered, or doesn't want their impressionable brains stuffed with CRT, is just out of luck if she wants to squeeze in a quick workout during free period. Or the Dad who now works from home due to his employer's irrational fears over the virus can't stay fit during the winter.
And, more recently, a vacuous reporter on NBC suggested that, to help alleviate the impact of the highest inflation in 30 years (inflation, by the way, goes hand-in-hand with supply chain disruptions, and is a common denominator among all Socialist/Communist systems), that Americans celebrate this Thanksgiving without the traditional turkey.
That's right, drop the turkey to save money. (Or, you could just pick up a Swanson's turkey TV dinner for everyone attending your family gathering.) She suggested "an Italian feast" instead.
She went on to note that, if you announce to your guests that you're not having turkey this Thanksgiving, some of your guests may decide not to show, and thus you'll save even more money on the holiday get-together.
See, these smug pundits can easily afford to throw out this glib "advice," or to snarkily ridicule the ire we all feel at facing this brave new world of not being able to find the things that we've always just assumed would be there, when we wanted them. Why?
The New Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C. boasts a state-of-the-art athletic center for employees of the Executive Office of the President, offering occupational health, physical fitness, athletic and recreational facilities. In other words, Jen Psaki doesn't need to worry about whether a treadmill shows up at her door in a timely manner, because you and I, as taxpayers, make sure that she has access to one any time of the day she wants to use it. She obviously doesn't exercise her brain, but she can exercise her body anytime she wants. (Heck, she can probably use the gym in the White House residence - you think Joe's working out in there?)
And that vapid NBC reporter? You can bloody well be sure that she'll be stuffing her otherwise empty head with turkey on Thanksgiving. (She doesn't make all that much money at NBC, but she's married to an anesthesiologist, so she came by her wealth the old-fashioned way.)
That may not sound insidious. But if you've studied the regimes in which bread lines and high inflation are the norm, you'll know to which class these people belong. They are the state (the state owns the media in those regimes, and if you think we're not moving in that direction here, you're not paying attention), and they would have the rest of us - bourgeoisie and proletariat alike - not only sacrifice what we have, what we've grown accustomed to, yes, what we've come to take for granted;
But to accept that sacrifice as the norm.
In fact, to see anything less than the acceptance of that sacrifice as something to be derided, an example of "privilege" to be winnowed from the rest of society like chaff from wheat.
Bollocks, I say.
We are the wheat, not the chaff. It should be perfectly acceptable to have a certain set of expectations based on the fact that we live in the eighth-richest country in the world. (The combined populations of the top seven are less than that of California.) Let's put this "privilege" notion to rest: if I lived in one of the poorest countries in the world, I'd have an entirely different set of expectations, and I'd accept them. My expectations are in part a function of where I live - yes, I'm blessed to live here. I didn't choose to be born here; it was the luck of the draw. But here I am, so I have a certain set of expectations.
Those expectations are also a function of the effort I've put forth to reach the point I've come to at this stage of my life. (Others are born into wealth. That's their business. More power to 'em.) I've earned - through the fruits of my labors - the right to a certain set of expectations. (Generosity is another piece of that equation, and it's another topic for another day.)
When I'm asked to expect less because my country has suddenly become poor through some unforeseeable event, like a war or a famine or a real pandemic or a widespread disaster, I'll be the first to step up and sacrifice. When I'm asked to expect less because I made a catastrophically bad financial decision, and I suddenly find my standard of living has been decimated, I'll accept the consequences of that, and adjust my expectations. When I'm asked to expect less because I suddenly and unexpectedly find myself facing astronomical medical expenses, and am unable to work to cover them, I'll accept that lot, and adjust my outlook accordingly.
But when I'm told I should expect less because a bunch of incompetent career bureaucrats in Washington who couldn't balance a checkbook and don't know a supply chain from a paper clip chain screwed up, made bad policy decisions, failed to foresee the consequences of the decisions they made in the absence of forethought, and created a situation in which my expectations cannot be met, I will not go quietly into that dark night.
So if I want to buy a treadmill, I bloody well expect that the model I want will show up at my door when I want it, and if Jen Psaki takes issue with that, I'll buy her a hammer and some sand, and provide instructions as to what she can do with them.
When I go to the grocery store, I expect to find everything on my list in one trip: toilet paper, facial tissue, paper towels, hand sanitizer, wipes, soup of every variety, tuna, canned veggies, beans, flour, pumpkin, Fresca, and meat.
And I will by God have turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.
***************
Now, having said all that -
I am most thankful to live in the country that I live in, to be able to have the luxury to expect these things. I'm thankful to live in a country that affords equal opportunity - I don't expect, and never have expected, equal outcomes. I am very thankful to have had the opportunity to work hard and earn my way to a place in life where I don't really want for anything, and to have been able to provide for my family the experiences and comforts we've enjoyed. I'm thankful to have been able to invest for a secure future.
And I'm thankful that I'm able to have turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. Not in a Swanson's TV dinner, but real turkey, with all the traditional accompaniments.
If anyone is reading this and legitimately cannot have that this Thanksgiving, please send me a message. I'll do my best to remedy that situation.
No comments:
Post a Comment